A Better New Year’s Resolution

Happy New Year! New Year card with folded colored paperI wrote a good blog post at this time seven years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year.

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My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but few follow through. Net result—unhappiness.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could, of course, just try harder, stiffen your resolve, etc. But you’ve been there, tried that.

You could also ditch the whole idea and just stop making resolutions. Avoid goal-failure by eliminating goal-setting. Effective, but at the cost of giving up on aspirations.

I heard another idea: replace the New Year’s Resolution List with a New Year’s Gratitude List. Here’s why it makes sense.

First, most resolutions are about self-improvement—this year I resolve to: quit smoking, lose weight, cut the gossip, drink less, exercise more, and so on.

All those resolutions are rooted in a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs—or with oneself.

In other words: resolutions often have a component of dissatisfaction with self. For many, it isn’t just dissatisfaction—it’s self-hatred. And the stronger the loathing of self, the stronger the resolutions—and the more they hurt when they go unfulfilled. It can be a very vicious circle.

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense.

People who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

Ergo, replace resolutions with gratitude. The best way to improve oneself is paradoxical—start by being grateful for what you already have. That turns your aspirations from negative (fixing a bad situation) to positive (making a fine situation even better).

Gratitude forces our attention outwards, to others—a common recommendation of almost all spiritual programs.

Finally, gratitude calms us. We worry less. We don’t obsess. We attract others by our calm, which makes our lives connected and meaningful. And before long, we tend to smoke less, drink less, exercise more, gossip less, and so on. Which of course is what we thought we wanted in the first place.

But the real truth is—it wasn’t the resolutions we wanted in the first place. It was the peace that comes with gratitude. We mistook cause for effect.

Go for an attitude of gratitude. The rest are positive side-effects.

 

2 replies
  1. Hazelhill
    Hazelhill says:

    Thought provoking as always. The focus on the positive approach got me thinking about how the Gratitude List approach might apply to organizations. It reminded me of various “Appreciative Inquiry” success stories, in which a recognition of behaviors that worked well helped transform practices in the organization .

    Once, when discussing Appreciative Inquiry with a strong proponent, I asked how it had effected her own behavior. She said, ” I used to ask my children what happened at school, or how was school today?”In response She got answers like “Nothing much” “I don’t want to talk about it” or a long list of complaints.
    By changing the question to “what went well today?” She found that her children opened up. They would much rather talk about positive things, ( over time they also shared more of the concerns they had too). Her children changed as well. Knowing that they would be asked ” what went well”, they started to notice, and indeed look for the positive things that happen each day. Eventually their behavior changed so that they became the catalyst for making positive things happen for others.
    Your” Gratitude List” brought her story back to me– for which I am grateful.

    Reply

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